With the increasingly mature M2M (Machine to Machine) market, the different requirements of M2M from H2H (human to human) causes attention by operators and standardization. In the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP), from SA working groups to RAN working groups, there are some study items or working items ongoing to optimize the network architecture or air interface for the new requirements from M2M applications. A typical M2M application is a utility meter, wherein the terminals of the utility meter are fixed but have no access to a fixed line. And meter terminals are very often installed in the basements of residential buildings or locations shielded by foil-backed insulation, metalized windows, or traditional thick-walled building construction. As a result, how to provide coverage to this special case in a problem that needs to be solved. Therefore, a more efficient data transmission and reception method with reduced control signaling overhead is needed.
On the other hand, the typical traffic of an M2M application is small data. Some of the data traffic packet size of the M2M application is comparable with control signaling. For example, the typical traffic of metering is small data with relax delay (e.g. size of the order of 100 bytes/message in UL and 20 bytes/message in DL, and allowing latency of up to 10 seconds for DL and up to 1 hour in uplink, i.e. not voice). Therefore, signaling overhead shall be reduced in order to improve spectral efficiency. Therefore, the technique of transport block (e.g., PDSCH (Physical Downlink Shared Channel)) coverage enhancement but with lower signaling overhead is an important issue. The benefit of transport block transmission and reception technique is not limited to the examples above.